Help with extortionate phone bill

RobTheDJ

Hi all, long time lurker, but felt as if i must post this for advice and to warn other consumers. I have been with Orange for 5 years and have had several mobiles from varying companies, the latest however has been a disaster.

I bought a phone from buymobilephones.net on the first of may. On the 15th, my usual billing date, my bill was £300! What they hadn't explained was that this was on a "pro rata" basis, i have never heard of that term before in my life, it apparently means that if you buy your mobile on the 1st of the month, and your billing date is on say the 10th, they only give you the corresponding amount of minuites

so in my experience
1000 mins in contract / 30 days in the month x 14 days til the billing date = 466mins.

so after using 450 mins more than that in the first 2 weeks, i got charged this £300

Is there ANYTHING i can do, i've tried calling the company i got it from but after talking to someone about it they put me on hold for 15 mins before i hung up, on 5 other occasions i've hung up after 10 mins when i cannot get through. Orange say nothing can be done i want me to pay up.

Please help

tinkerbell84

Pro rata is a very common term.

If you signed up to a contract with 1000 minutes a month, and then used them all in 2 weeks, what were you planning to do for the rest of the month?

RobTheDJ

To you, the term pro rota may be commen, it is not to me. I used most of the minuites in two weeks as my mate was moving to New Zealand and i'm gonna miss him so much and i thought i had 1000 mins to use

rev_henry

I'm afraid this is standard practice within the mobile phone industry. It's been the way it works for many years. Sorry.

RobTheDJ

i should also mention that they did not explain that this would happen and neither is it in the terms and conditions which they keep saying that it is?

tinkerbell84

RobTheDJ wrote: »

To you, the term pro rota may be commen, it is not to me. I used most of the minuites in two weeks as my mate was moving to New Zealand and i'm gonna miss him so much and i thought i had 1000 mins to use

Why would you think that a contract with 1000 minutes a month would give you 1000 minutes in a fortnight?

If you were being paid £1000 a month and worked 2 weeks, would you expect to get £1000?

rev_henry

This will certainly be in the orange terms and conditions, so unfortunately I doubt there is much you can do, sorry.

RobTheDJ

For Rev: Please, if you can find where it mentions it in the Ts & Cs then tell me, i am all out of options. http://www.buymobilephones.net/store/info_terms.ihtml?id=6

For Tinkerbell: If i enter a contract with 1000 mins, is it not up to me how i use them? If i was on the phone for 15 hours straight on the first day i got my phone and used them all up, is that not up to me?

tinkerbell84

Yes it is. If you have 15 hours worth of minutes in that billing period. You didn't. I don't see how you can think you should when you knew your billing date was just a fortnight after the contract started?

tinkerbell84

It seems you are not alone though - a quick google search threw this up

http://groups.google.com/group/uk.telecom.mobile/browse_thread/thread/97ef925ffa162f46

Cavey

I just changed contract and I must admit that this is a little odd, but there isn't really a better way.

Let's assume (for ease) that your £30 contract runs from the 1st of a month until the 1st of the following month during which time you are allowed to use 1000 minutes (I am gonna ignore texts as it would be superfluous). In this, I take it you understand that if you use your allowance up by the 12th, you have no more free minutes until the 1st of the next month.

Problems arise when you upgrade on a day which doesn't match your billing cycle. If you upgrade on the 20th, you have spent 20 days on your old tariff (which you paid for on the previous bill) and will then spend 10 days on the new tariff. As such, on your next bill the company will refund you the 10 days you had pre-paid for your old tariff and charge you for one month and 10 days on the new tariff.

It will also allocate a proportion of the free minutes you had to each area. The 1st to the 20th will have 2/3 the allocation for the first contract, the 20th to the 30th will have 1/3 an allocation for the second contract. I can see a problem here if you use all your allocation for your first contract in the first 2/3 as you will probably get charged for the "excess", even if you don't use your phone again that month.

With me, this meant I lost unused minutes - I had over 300 left (from rollover) nearing the end of the month and it dropped to 160 for the last 5 days - but didn't lose money and, unless your usage is consistent/uniform, I guess you can't help but lose something in changing contracts.

Does that help explain what has caused the problem? (If not, I will try again).

You might therefore be able to get some money knocked off by pointing out that you had unused minutes left from the first half of the month pro-rata and that this should balance your account (perhaps totally, but at least partially).

There's also an interesting part on the thread tinkerbell posted....

You are liable for the bill, but only because OSPS failed to inform you
of the pro-rata nature. I would suggest you take it up with OSPS or sue
them.

I'd certainly dispute the full charge, but I wouldn't be expecting to get away without paying the full charge without showing that buymobilephones.net were negligent (which will probably be difficult).

Anyway, I have to admit that until you raised this issue I had not realised this had happened two years ago when I first took a contract as I had to wait for it to arrive from my parents address (where my bank details are registered) which resulted in sufficient delay (well, that and my billing was 1 day from when the service started) that I didn't incur any charges, so thank you for posting.